There has been proposed a Bluetooth low energy (BLE) beacon using BLE as a communication technology replacing near field communication that is short-range wireless communication. The BLE beacon was commercialized in various fields including provision of location information, marketing, purchase, automatic check-in, or the like.
The near field communication (NFC) has an effective communication distance of about 4 cm to 20 cm, whereas the BLE beacon has an expanded effective communication distance of about 5 cm to 50 m. The NFC has a requirement that a separate chip is mounted in each mobile communication terminal. However, short-range wireless communication using the beacon is possible only with a BLE recognition function in the BLE beacon. Therefore, the BLE beacon is capable of economically providing a wireless communication service even in a wide room, compared with the NFC.
The BLE beacon has low power consumption to provide a wireless communication service only using a penny-sized battery for more than one year. Although the number of slave devices is limited to seven in classic Bluetooth technology, synchronization with slave devices, the number of which is not limited, is possible in the BLE 4.0 of the recent version.